Natasha's Dance (89 page)

    Among the Parisian emigres Bunin was revered as the heir to this literary heritage, a living affirmation that the realist tradition of Turg-enev and Tolstoy continued on in the diaspora. As Bunin himself put it in a celebrated speech of 1924, it was ‘The Mission of the Emigration’ to act for the ‘True Russia’ by protecting this inheritance from the modernist corruptions of left-wing and Soviet art. The mantle of national leadership had been conferred on Bunin, as a writer, only after 1917. Before the Revolution he had not been placed by many in

    the highest class: his prose style was heavy and conventional compared to the favoured writers of the avant-garde. But after 1917 there was a revolution in the artistic values of the emigres. They came to reject the literary avant-garde, which they associated with the revolutionaries, and, once they found themselves abroad, they took great comfort in the old-fashioned ‘Russian virtues’ of Bunin’s prose. As one critic put it, Bunin’s works were the ‘repository of a covenant’, a ‘sacred link’ between the emigration and the Russia that was lost. Even Gorky, in Berlin, would abandon everything and lock himself away to read the latest volume of Bunin’s stories as soon as it arrived in the mail from Paris. As an heir to the realist tradition, Gorky thought of Bunin as the last great Russian writer in the broken line of Chekhov and Tolstoy.
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In 1933 Bunin was awarded the Nobel Prize, the first Russian writer to be honoured in this way. Coming as it did at a time when Stalin was putting Soviet culture into chains, the award was perceived by the emigres as a recognition of the fact that the True Russia (as defined by culture) was abroad. Gippius, who was somewhat prone to hero-worship, called Bunin ‘Russia’s prime minister in exile’. Others hailed him as the ‘Russian Moses’ who would lead the exiles back to their promised land.
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    The Russia Bunin re-creates in his stories is a dreamland. In ‘The Mowers’ (1923) and ‘Unhurried Spring’ (1924) he conjures up a vision of the old rural Russia that had never been - a sunny happy land of virgin forests and boundless steppes where the peasants were hardworking and happy in their work, in harmony with nature and their fellow farmers - the nobility. There could not have been a starker contrast with Bunin’s dark portrayal of provincial rot in
The Village,
the novel that had first brought him to fame in 1910, nor a more ironic one. For Bunin was now escaping to precisely the sort of rural fantasy which he himself had done so much to puncture in his earlier work. In exile, his literary mission was to contrast the idyll he imagined in the Russian countryside with the evil of the cities where Bolshevism had corrupted the good old Russian ways. But the land he portrayed was, in his own admission, ‘an Elysium of the Past’, a shift ‘into a kind of dream’,
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and not an actual place to which the exiles could return. Retreating into a legendary past is perhaps a natural response of the artist who is dislocated from his native land. Nabokov even took artistic

    inspiration from the experience of exile. But for Bunin it must have been particularly difficult to write when he was cut off from his own country. How could a realist write about a Russia that no longer was?

    Emigration tends to breed conservatives in art. Retrospection and nostalgia are its moods. Even Stravinsky found himself moving away from the ultra-modernism of
The Rite of Spring,
the last major work of his ‘Russian period’, to the neoclassicism of the Bach-like works of his Parisian exile. Others became stuck in the style they had developed in their native land - unable to move on in the new world. This was true of Rachmaninov. Like Bunin’s writing, his music remained trapped in the late Romantic mode of the nineteenth century.

    Sergei Rachmaninov had learned composition at the Moscow Conservatory at a time when Tchaikovsky was its musical hero, and it was Tchaikovsky who had made the deepest impact on his life and art. In exile in New York after 1917, Rachmaninov remained untouched by the avant-garde - the last of the Romantics in the modern age. In a revealing interview in 1939, which the composer forbade to be published in his own lifetime, he explained to Leonard Liebling of
The Musical Courier
his feelings of estrangement from the world of modernism. His musical philosophy was rooted in the Russian spiritual tradition, where the role of the artist was to create beauty and to speak the truth from the depths of his heart.

    I felt like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien. I cannot cast out the old way of writing, and I cannot acquire the new. I have made intense efforts to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me… I always feel that my own music and my reactions to all music remain spiritually the same, unendingly obedient in trying to create beauty… The new kind of music seems to come not from the heart but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel. They have not the capacity to make their works exalt - they mediate, protest, analyse, reason, calculate and brood, but they do not exalt.’
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    In his last major interview, in 1941, Rachmaninov revealed the spiritual connection between this outpouring of emotion and his Russianness.

    I am a Russian composer, and the land of my birth has influenced my temperament and outlook. My music is a product of the temperament, and so it is

    Russian music. I never consciously attempt to write Russian music, or any other kind of music. What I try to do when writing down my music is to say simply and directly what is in my heart.
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    The ‘Russianness’ of Rachmaninov’s music, a kind of lyrical nostalgia, became the emotional source of his musical conservatism in exile.

    Being out of step had always been a part of his persona. Born in 1873 to an ancient noble family from Novgorod province, Rachmaninov had been an unhappy child. His father had walked out on the family and left his mother penniless when he was only six. Two years later the young boy was sent to study music in St Petersburg. He invested his emotions in his music. He came to view himself as an outsider, and that Romantic sense of alienation became fused with his identity as an artist and later as an emigre. Exile and isolation as a theme figured in his music from an early stage. It was even there in his graduation piece from the Conservatory, a one-act opera called
Aleko
(1892), based on Pushkin’s ‘Gypsies’, in which the Russian hero of the poem is rejected by the gypsies and banished to the life of a lonely fugitive. Rachmaninov’s best-known music before 1917 was already marked by a precocious nostalgia for his native land: the
Vespers
(1915), with their conscious imitation of the ancient church plainchants;
The Bells
(1912), which allowed him to explore that Russian sound; and above all the piano concertos. The haunting opening theme of the Third Piano Concerto (1909) is liturgical in manner and very similar to the Orthodox chant from the vesper service used at the Pechersk monastery in Kiev, although Rachmaninov himself denied that it had any religious source. Rachmaninov had never been a regular churchgoer and after his marriage to his first cousin, Natalia Satina, a marriage forbidden by the Russian Church, he ceased to go at all. Yet he felt a deep attachment to the rituals and the music of the Church, especially the sound of Russian bells, which reminded him of his childhood in Moscow. This became a source of his nostalgia after 1917.

    The other source of Rachmaninov’s nostalgia was his longing for the Russian land. He yearned for one patch of land in particular: his wife’s estate at Ivanovka, five hundred kilometres south-east of Moscow, where he had spent his summers from the age of eight, when the Rachmaninovs were forced to sell their own estate. Ivanovka

    contained his childhood and romantic memories. In 1910, the estate became his own through marriage and he moved there with Natalia. Ivanovka was the place where he composed nearly all his works before 1917. ‘It had no special wonders - no mountains, ravines or ocean views’, Rachmaninov remembered in 1931. ‘It was on the steppe, and instead of the boundless ocean there were endless fields of wheat and rye stretching to the horizon.’
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This is the landscape whose spirit is expressed in Rachmaninov’s music. ‘The Russians’, he explained to an American magazine (and he was clearly thinking mainly of himself), ‘feel a stronger tie to the soil than any other nationality. It comes from an instinctive inclination towards quietude, tranquillity, admiration of nature, and perhaps a quest for solitude. It seems to me that every Russian is something of a hermit.’
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In 1917 the Ivanovka peasants forced Rachmaninov to abandon his home. ‘They often got drunk and ran round the estate with flaming torches,’ recalled one of the villagers. ‘They stole the cattle and broke into the stores.’ After his departure -first for Sweden and then for the USA - the house was looted and burned down.
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For Rachmaninov, the loss of Ivanovka was equated with the loss of his homeland, and the intense pain of exile which he always felt was mingled with its memory.

    Financial hardship forced Rachmaninov, at the age of forty-five, to start a new career as a piano virtuoso, touring Europe or the US every year. His peripatetic lifestyle left little time for composition. But he himself put his failure to compose down to his painful separation from the Russian soil: ‘When I left Russia, I left behind the desire to compose: losing my country, I lost myself also.’
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    In America, where they bought their first home in 1921, and then in France and Switzerland from 1930, the Rachmaninovs tried to re-create the special Russian atmosphere of Ivanovka, holding house parties for their Russian friends: Bunin, Glazunov, Horowitz, Nabokov, Fokine and Heifetz - all were frequent guests. They spoke in Russian, employed Russian servants, Russian cooks, a Russian secretary, consulted Russian doctors and scrupulously observed all the Russian customs such as drinking tea from a
samovar
and attending midnight mass. Their country house in France, at Clairefontaine near Paris, was purchased because it bordered on a secluded pine wood like the one in which Rachmaninov had liked to walk at Ivanovka. The

    Russian atmosphere the couple re-created there was described by their American friends, the Swans, who visited them in 1931:

    The chateau-like house, Le Pavilion, protected from the street by a solid wrought fence, lent itself well to this Russian life on a large scale… The wide steps of the open veranda led into the park. The view was lovely: an unpretentious green in front of the house, a tennis court tucked away among shrubs, sandy avenues flanked with tall, old trees, leading into the depths of the park, where there was a large pond. The whole arrangement was very much like that of an old Russian estate… A small gate opened into the vast hunting grounds: pine woods with innumerable rabbits. Rachmaninov loved to sit under the pine trees and watch the pranks of the rabbits. In the morning the big table in the dining room was set for breakfast. As in the country in Russia, tea was served and with it cream, ham, cheese, hard-boiled eggs. Everybody strolled in leisurely. There were no rigid rules or schedules to disturb the morning sleep.
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    Gradually, as the old routines of Ivanovka were resumed, Rachmaninov returned to composing music once again - full-blown nostalgic works like the Third Symphony (1936). Western critics were surprised by the conservatism of the symphony’s harmonic language, comparing it to the romanticism of a bygone age. But this was to miss its Russianness. The Third Symphony was a retrospective work - a farewell to the Russian tradition - and its whole purpose was to
dwell
on the spirit of the past. At a rehearsal of the
Three Russian Songs
(1926) in the USA in the 1930s Rachmaninov implored the chorus to slow down. ‘I beg you,’ he told the singers, ‘do not spoil it for a devout Russian Orthodox churchman. Please, sing more slowly.’
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    ’Our tragedy’, wrote Nina Berberova of the younger exiled writers in the 1920s, was ‘our inability to evolve in terms of style.’
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The renewal of style entailed a fundamental problem for the emigres. If their purpose as Russian artists was to preserve their national culture, how could they evolve Stylistically without adapting to their new environment and

    hence, in some ways, abandoning Russia? The problem mainly affected the younger generation - writers like Nabokov who had ‘emerged naked from the Revolution’.
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Older writers like Bunin brought with them to the West an established readership and written style from which they could not break. There was too much pressure on them to continue in the comforting traditions of the past - to churn out plays and stories about nests of Russian gentlefolk - and those who tried to break away were little prized or understood. Tsvetaeva’s tragedy - to lose the readership that had sustained her as the rising star of the pre-revolutionary avant-garde - was yet another variant of this experience.

    Scattered in bookshops, greyed by dust and time, Unseen, unsought, unopened, and unsold, My poems will be savoured as are rarest wines -When they are old.
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    Even Miliukov, former statesman, historian and editor of the Parisian journal
Poslednie novosti,
said, ‘I don’t understand Tsvetaeva.’
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But for writers like Nabokov who had yet to find their feet there was little point or prospect in returning to the past. The old generation was dying out and the new becoming less Russian by the day as it assimilated into the mainstream of European culture. To create a new readership such writers had to break out of the mould.

    Nabokov was the first major writer to complete this literary metamorphosis. According to Berberova, he was the only Russian-language writer of her generation with the genius to create not just a new style of writing but a new reader, too. ‘Through him we learned to identify not with his fictional heroes’ - as the nineteenth-century writers expected of their readers - ‘but with the author, with Nabokov, and his existential themes became our theme as well.’
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Nabokov always claimed that his writings were not about Russia or the emigres. But exile was their central theme. And even if he saw that as a universal theme, a metaphor of the human condition, the appearance of Nabokov’s writings in the Berlin of the 1920s was received by the Russian emigres as an affirmation of their own national identity. Nabokov’s writings were proof that ‘Russia’ (as embodied in its culture) was still with them in the West. As Berberova put it, with the